From This Dirt Forward

In a slightly belated gesture to celebrate my dad on Father’s Day, today’s garden tour is in his honor. Although my Dad lives 900 miles away in rural Vermont, his influence is seen everywhere in my Indiana gardens. 

Dad at home in Vermont with Sobie (that four-legged dark shadow) and his mums

I learned my most valuable gardening skill from my dad—patience.  You’ve never known patience until you’ve known my dad.  I consider myself blessed to have inherited just a fraction of his calm perseverance.  I may be content pulling garden weeds by hand, but Dad exudes joy “brush hogging” his 5-acre field with a hand scythe.  (He had his scythe custom made based on his body measurements. Seriously.) 

My Dad epitomizes all the sayings about life being a journey, not a destination.  This admirable trait makes him a skilled gardener, my favorite hiking partner, and a role model of a father.

The first true test of my gardening patience was supposed to come from our recent conversion of ½ acre of our yard to a native prairie.  It normally takes a few years for prairie plants to establish their deep root systems and begin putting substantial energy into flowering.  (This is a big commitment on my part considering the last time I even lived at same address for more than two years, I was in high school and living under my dad’s roof.)  I had fully braced myself for enduring years of patient weeding with a slow rate of return.  Our native prairie seed mix was augmented with a couple of annual species (corn poppies and cosmos) for people not lucky enough to possess my dad’s gardening patience… like my husband whose reaction to undertaking this project was something like “WHAT!!?? We don’t even know if we’ll be living here in three years!”

Diverse native prairie currently exhibiting as a monoculture of poppies.

Wowza!  I’m pretty sure this isn’t normal.  We have ourselves one massive display of poppies.  My husband is thrilled; I’m frantically searching for natives in the understory of the poppy canopy.  Now we’re  just waiting for the sheriff to show up thinking we’re farming its illicit relative.

I turn my nose up at the likes of roses, peonies and daylilies because I view them as too traditional and mainstream for my young, eco-minded gardens.  That said, you might find it peculiar that I’m propagating chrysanthemums.  I blame it on my dad and the serious case of nostalgia I have for my flowerful childhood at Maidstone Plant Farm.  My dad does an exquisite job growing 1500-2000 hardy potted mums every year in his front yard. Summer just doesn’t feel like summer to me without mums to fuss over.  Here’s the band-aid for my nostalgia. 

However, I am adding my own twist on mum propagation techniques.  In an effort to green up the otherwise not-so-sustainable process of growing these water and fertilizer needy plants, I started by making my own soil mixture using nutrient-rich composted biosolids.  We’re trying to capture and reuse rainwater runoff from our barn roof to irrigate the mums (but this saga deserves it own blog post.)  The mums are also in re-used tree pots from a local nursery.  I know I’ll never get them to Dad’s level of perfection, but it’s fun trying.

The spring rush of greens, strawberries, and peas is winding down and I fear we are approaching that notorious 2-3 week lull where our biggest harvest will be weeds and mosquito bites. 

As always, I planted way too many leafy greens that all peaked at exactly the same time.  There are only so many bowls of leafy green things you can make your husband eat.

Rainbow Swiss Chard, Spinach, French Mesclun, A Heirloom Cutting Mix, and Grand Rapids Lettuce

Last year I overloaded this planter along our garden shed with colorful annuals, but this year I’m enjoying this understated display of miniature sunflowers.

"Junior" Container Sunflower

This is the butterfly garden that we planted last summer with about 20 species of native, local-genotype wildflowers and grasses.  It was the perfect spot to plant locally-adapted natives because it’s too far from the house for a hose to reach. We watered this garden once—the day we planted the small plugs.  In bloom are Penstemon digitalis (Foxglove Beard Tongue), Coreopsis Lanceolata (Lance-leaved Tickseed), and Echinacea pallida (Pale Purple Coneflower). 

The "butterfly garden"

Making a decorative succulent mixed container was somewhere near the bottom of my summer to-do list, but when I saw this one for $20 at Meijer this spring I couldn’t resist buying it.  Impulse buying is NOT something my Dad taught me; hence I do it with the same care he puts into buying hiking boots.  This container makes the perfect low-profile centerpiece for the dining table on our hot, south-facing deck. 

My mixed combos on the deck have traditionally been bursting with color, but now that the surrounding perennial gardens are offering more interest, I’m toning down the containers and featuring contrasting chartreuse and burgundy foliage.  They look really sharp against the dark wood.

This is my favorite view.  I spend a lot of time just sitting here at our kitchen table looking out over our gardens, quietly dreaming and scheming with a luke warm cup of coffee.  This introspective habit, without a doubt, came from my Dad.  The kitchen table was, and still is, the center of his home and the catchall of his life. 

I wish I could’ve spent Father’s Day sitting around his kitchen table talking (or silently reflecting as we often do) about gardens and mountains, but I know that there’s a piece of him in the gardens that I tend to everyday, and I’d like to think that there’s a piece of me in some of his.  (I definitely know there’s a piece of me in those fields of tansy he’s scything, but that’s a story for another day.)

This post was brought to you by the dog Maddie and the flower Poppy.